Words: Zak Maoui
Photography: Pip Bourdillon
Styling: Zak Maoui
At one time, Sheyi Cole was so good at athletics that he was heading towards the Olympics. “At school, I was involved in athletics – sprint racing and triple jump,” the 25-year-old Bromley-born actor, who at 14 was smashing PBs in the English Schools’ Athletics Championships, tells me. “I trained with Olympic champion Dina Asher-Smith three to four times a week. There came a day when I realised I wasn’t disciplined enough for it, so I took a step back and enjoyed my teenage years.”
Pausing Tuesday night sprints allowed Cole to discover his true passion: drama. “My school had a great department, which led me to audition for the Brit School,” he says. “The arts stuck with me.” Cole was applying for the world-famous institution, known for being the playground of Adele and Amy Winehouse, just as another aspiring actor, Tom Holland, was leaving. “Brit School was basically High School Musical on steroids,” Cole says of the college. “People were on the tables singing and dancing. It was a community that catered to my love of performance.”
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Cole, who was living at home with his mother, applied to every drama school going during his gap year, to no avail. With the help of Open Door, a scheme that helps underprivileged actors get into drama school (“it helped with funding, because it’s expensive and that’s why only a certain demographic can go”), Cole eventually got four places. He enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, but job offers were already beginning to trickle in. “In my final year at Brit School, I was also in the National Youth Theatre, and through that there was an opportunity to audition for a Sky series called Curfew,” he explains. “I didn’t get the part, but I met Zoe Stoker, who has been my agent since. With her help, I got a part in Small Axe.”
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In Steve McQueen’s award-winning 2020 series, Cole plays Alex Wheatle, a Black British novelist who was sentenced to prison after the 1981 Brixton uprising. It cemented Cole’s place on the map as one to watch. “Working with Steve was a professional opportunity and I was thrown into the deep end with no floats,” he says of the auteur, whom he worked with when he was just 20 years old. “He’s like my father in the industry. I owe him a lot. I had a lot of eyes on me from a young age because of him.”
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From there, Cole went on to have roles in Boxing Day and producer Donald Glover’s Atlanta. He also filmed HBO Max and Steven Soderbergh’s Full Circle. This year, he starred alongside Bill Nighy in The Beautiful Game, which was filmed in 2021 and centres around the charitable Homeless World Cup. And this stuck with Cole. “Working with a charity and getting viewers to not look at the circumstances of people, but rather their humanity, is important,” he explains. “I want people to be moved when they see my work.” In the aforementioned Full Circle, he played a Guyanese character. “You never see that in mainstream culture. It’s a developing country that is coming up, but you’d never know that.”
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Acting isn’t Cole’s only passion. Though he’s got an undisclosed five projects on the go, and athletics was parked a long time ago, he is a self-described “actor who sings”, and released his first single, ‘Heartbreaker’, in May. “I’m a multi-hyphenate,” the professional tenor says. “I want to be like Pharrell. I want to work with the top level, the Soderberghs and Lucy Prebbles of the world. Whatever project I attach myself to, it needs to be with the best, in music and acting.”
And Cole, despite being only 25, has grand plans. “If I could be in Denzel Washington and Spike Lee’s next partnership, that would be the one for me,” he says with confidence. “I aim big and I know what I want. I have to be my biggest cheerleader. The industry doesn’t care about us as actors.”
With special thanks to:
Photo assistant: George Robson
Grooming: Bianca Simone Scott
Location: Hackney Studios
This feature was taken from our Spring 2024 issue. Read more about it here.
Want more interviews? Read our feature on Connor Swindells…
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